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Waiting for the Bomb to Drop

By Paul Saint-Amour August 3, 2015 3:21 amAugust 3, 2015 3:21 am

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

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Credit Associated Press

I.

My mother doesn’t remember Pearl Harbor. But she was there. Barely two months old, she spent the raid held tightly by her mother in an improvised bomb shelter, where the two of them had joined some Honolulu neighbors. My Chinese-American grandmother, Grace Lam Katsura, remembered it all her life: the sound of the planes, the klaxons, the confusion. She recalled the explosions, first down in the harbor and then closer, as friendly fire from antiaircraft guns fell on the city. Most of all she remembered the paralyzing suspense she had felt, waiting in the dark and wondering whether the next explosion would claim her life and her baby’s.

Forty years later, she told the story to her panicky grandson. I was 11 and had just learned that Soviet ICBMs could deliver nuclear weapons to targets in the United States, including the military town in California where I lived. In sharing her Pearl Harbor memories, my grandmother meant to reassure me. “What you’re worrying about might never happen,” she seemed to be saying. “At least you’re not waiting under real planes as your mother and I did, while real bombs were falling.”

But in my mind, her memory of Pearl Harbor fused with my terror of nuclear weapons. After all, my own country had already used them against civilians in Japan, the country from which my grandfather’s family had emigrated. That fact made reassurances ring hollow. As long as these weapons exist, I thought, we are all down in that shelter, in perpetual suspense.

As I got deeper into my teens, everyday events could make nuclear war seem imminent. Sudden interruptions in TV or radio programs, even tests of the Emergency Broadcast System, put my heart in my mouth. When a low-flying jet went over, I waited for the blinding flash of a detonating warhead. In every false alarm I saw a premonition of the inevitable true one. I’ve learned since that I wasn’t alone. Over the years I’ve talked with many other children of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain who were convinced that nuclear weapons would foreshorten their lives and end their world.

Fortunately nuclear war didn’t occur, or hasn’t yet. Few American civilians have firsthand experience of aerial bombardment. Although we may worry about terrorist attacks, we are less tensed for death to rain from the skies. But civilians in other countries have experienced a ratcheting-up of that tension because of policies carried out in our name. In every country where United States drones routinely operate, noncombatants are exposed to the full range of the weapons’ effects. When a strike occurs, civilians are often among the dead. When they survive, they may sustain physical injuries, the loss of property and livelihood, and the shock of seeing friends or family members killed. Many survivors and witnesses of drone strikes exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

For those on the ground, drone overflights are a diabolical hybrid of air raid and Cold War.

But even when strikes don’t occur, drones profoundly impact those who live under them. The journalist David Rohde, who witnessed drone flights as a captive of the Afghan Taliban, described the weapons as helping to create a “hell on earth” for Pakistani civilians. “From the ground,” he wrote, “it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.” A 2012 report by human rights and global justice clinics at the Stanford and N.Y.U. law schools, “Living Under Drones,” found an astonishing range of symptoms among Pakistanis in drone areas. These included sleeplessness, bad dreams, loss of appetite, fainting, amplified startle reactions, outbursts of anger and emotional breakdowns. Syed Akhunzada Chitan, a National Assembly member based in Islamabad, told the authors of the report how the weapons were affecting people in his family home in Waziristan. “They wake up in the middle of the night screaming because they are hallucinating about drones.”

For those on the ground, drone overflights are a diabolical hybrid of air raid and Cold War. They take the world-rending suspense my grandmother remembered and stretch it out over weeks, months, even years. Like nuclear weapons, drones turn the prospect of death from above into a condition of everyday life.

II.

It’s true that tensing for a blow is not the same thing as receiving one. But a few people have suggested that when it comes to the scale and intensities of modern warfare, trauma’s mere possibility can traumatize. Susan Sontag was one. Writing in 1965, she saw Japanese monster films and other popular representations of disaster as evidence “that a mass trauma exists over the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of future nuclear wars.” The critic Lewis Mumford was another, claiming in 1938 that “the constant anxiety over war produces by itself a collective psychosis comparable to that which active warfare might develop.”

We’ve been slow to consider such claims. The study of shellshocked soldiers in the First World War led eventually to the recognition of PTSD. But Freud, after observing shell-shock victims, concluded that anxiety was a shield against traumatization, not a source of it — that a pre-traumatic stress disorder was therefore impossible. Later research tended to see war anxiety as part of PTSD. If you feared an attack it was because you’d undergone a prior one and were jumpy about a sequel. Only recently have mental health researchers begun to talk about “anticipatory anxiety.” But here, too, the emphasis has been on anxiety’s roots in a past trauma and on helping patients expose the imaginary nature of the danger in the present.

Fixated on the aftermath of trauma, we haven’t much troubled to study its beforemath — what Mumford called the “collective psychosis” of anticipation. Yet if Mumford and Sontag were right, such a psychosis became central to the experience of many civilians during the 20th century. And for too many it remains a central experience today.

We can still clear a space for thinking and feeling about others, and others’ futures, even when our own seems annulled.

Understanding the psychological burdens imposed by the ongoing threat of violence — that would be a start. But we also need, politically, to see such burdens as unacceptably violating the freedom and human rights of those who bear them. And we need, ethically, to confront questions like: If my life is not overshadowed by threat, how do I responsibly imagine a life that is? What do I owe those who live such a life, especially if I am implicated in what threatens them? If I do know what it’s like to live in the shadow of violence, how do I make common cause with others without treating all shadows as equal, all futures as equally foreclosed?

These days, my touchstone for thinking about trauma’s beforemath is Virginia Woolf’s “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.” Written in August and September 1940 as the Battle of Britain was giving way to the Blitz, Woolf’s essay is a letter to America from an England besieged by German bombers. It reads, at points, like a description of life under drones in present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. “Here they are again,” Woolf writes. “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death.” The noise intensifies: “The drone of the planes is now like the sawing of a branch overhead.” As the searchlights converge above her room, Woolf counts the seconds, waiting. “The bomb did not fall. But during those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased.”

There may be no better account of how war terror numbs and stupefies. But Woolf’s piece is even more extraordinary in what it sets up as “the only efficient air-raid shelter”: a critical reflection on peace. Not imagining peace on any terms, but thinking, in war’s midst, about how to oppose the wrong kind of peace. The work of refusing such a peace would fall to others: her diary entry for June 27, 1940, reads, “I can’t believe there will be a 27th June 1941.” All the same, she went on to make one of the most radical feminist statements of her time, on behalf of a future she didn’t believe she would live to see.

If we miss the power of war anxiety to crush thought and halt feeling, we also miss the courage of Woolf’s words. It’s the courage to make both connections and distinctions — between men and women, soldiers and civilians, one’s own death and another’s death — in the face of a threat that would efface them all. It reminds us that we can still clear a space for thinking and feeling about others, and others’ futures, even when our own seems annulled. By the same token, it reminds us that others may already have been engulfed by the disaster that looms for us.

III.

If there is a “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” for our day, it may be Roy Scranton’s “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.” In his essay, which appeared in this series in 2013, Scranton recounted the daily terror of death he felt while stationed in Iraq as a private in the United States Army shortly after the 2003 invasion. Whenever he went out on mission, he “looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.” He learned from an 18th-century samurai manual to begin each morning by picturing, in detail, his own inevitable death. Having in essence written his obituary, he was then able to get on with the day’s duties.

When Scranton later returned to the States and confronted stark evidence of global climate change, he concluded that the time had come for humanity to envision its death — to learn, as a civilization, how to die. That might mean confronting our extinction as a species. At the very least it would mean accepting the futurelessness of our current way of being on earth. “The sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves,” he wrote, “the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”

Here Scranton recognizes that war has no monopoly on traumatizing anticipation. A soldier’s way of coping with the possibility of imminent death in a battle zone might be used by all of us as we face the storms in our future. That way of coping is philosophical, facing death through reading and meditation. Indeed, it sets out from the premise that “studying philosophy is learning how to die,” for both the individual and the species.

Yet in scaling up from one person to all humanity, we pass through a middle range — the social and political, Woolf’s home turf — where both connections and distinctions between people come into play. Yes, we are all at risk in climate change. But like our exposure to military violence, that risk is distributed unevenly. It falls disproportionately on those with the least protection from extreme weather, rising sea levels, hunger, drought, disease, displacement and the conflicts that can arise from all of these. Simply put, it falls most heavily on the poor.

With philosophy’s help, I am prepared to tell myself, “I must learn how to die.” I may even be ready to say to humanity, “We as a species must learn how to die.” But it is a different thing altogether to say to another person, “Because of how I live, or because of actions undertaken in my name, you need to learn how to die more than I do. And you must bear, more than I do, the cognitive and emotional burdens of a life lived in the shadow of imminent death.” This is what the rich are saying every day to the poor. It’s what whites in the United States and elsewhere are saying every day to people of color. It’s what citizens of drone states are saying to those a hemisphere away, under the drones.

I agree with Scranton: only by recognizing that the privileges we now enjoy are already forfeit can we begin imagining a life without them. But the how in “learning how to die” is also an ethical one. It names the manner in which we confront the futurelessness of the way we live. What values will help us lay down our presumptuous claims on the planet without also renouncing our responsibilities to one another? With what sense of justice and equality will we meet the coming changes? If we must survive by letting go of our current way of life, how are we to be sure we’re not asking others to let go of more of that way of life — especially if they enjoyed less of it to begin with?

Earlier this year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight, citing the dangers posed to humanity by climate change and by the existence of large nuclear arsenals that are currently beingmodernized rather than dismantled. That clock now reads 11:57 p.m., and we should heed its warning. But the Doomsday Clock has a built-in problem. It puts us all at the same place on the same timepiece. We know, of course, that in the ticking-clock drama of planet Earth, some of us are closer than others to the zero hour. And some have reached it already.

Paul Saint-Amour teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is “Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form.”

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.